Ralph McQuarrie spent his early career drawing aircraft and spacecraft so that engineers and television audiences could understand them. Then, in his mid-forties, he was asked to paint a film that did not yet exist. The pictures he made in 1975 were not storyboards or decoration: they were pitch documents, designed to persuade a studio and a crew that an imagined world could be real. That makes his work unusually relevant to anyone who presents concepts to clients.
His paintings are in copyright, and the films and characters they show are trademarks of their owners; this guide is independent and discusses them editorially. No McQuarrie work appears in the open-access collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Cleveland Museum of Art, so the guide describes his work in text only and never treats it as free to use. For public-domain images to study alongside him, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Ralph McQuarrie?
McQuarrie was born in Gary, Indiana, on 13 June 1929 and grew up on a farm near Billings, Montana. He served in the US Army during the Korean War and afterwards studied at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, today’s ArtCenter College of Design. He died on 3 March 2012, aged 82.
His working life began in technical illustration. At the Boeing Company he worked as a preliminary design illustrator, and his obituaries describe him drawing diagrams for manuals on the 747 airliner. He also designed film posters and, with a small company called Reel Three, made animated sequences explaining the Apollo missions for CBS News coverage. Those jobs trained him to make complex hardware legible and to picture machines in space convincingly, the same skills that space illustrators such as Chesley Bonestell had brought to magazines a generation earlier.
The filmmakers Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins asked him to paint concept illustrations for a film project of their own. Those paintings brought him to the attention of George Lucas.
Key works by Ralph McQuarrie
Production paintings for Star Wars (1975). In 1975 Lucas commissioned McQuarrie to illustrate scenes from his script. The resulting paintings, now catalogued by the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, show desert planets, a cantina, a battle station trench and a duel between two armoured figures. His obituaries, including those by CBS News and Empire magazine, credit the paintings with helping Lucas win backing from 20th Century Fox. McQuarrie developed the looks of many of the main characters, including the black-armoured villain, the two robots and the tall furred co-pilot. His early golden robot was influenced by the robot in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, a design steeped in the machine glamour covered in our guide to Art Deco design.
Sequel designs (1980 and 1983). For The Empire Strikes Back (1980) he produced concept paintings for the ice-planet battle, with its giant four-legged walkers, and for a city floating in clouds. He worked on Return of the Jedi (1983) as well, and, as quoted in his Guardian obituary, later said he found it harder to keep his enthusiasm up.
Other films (1977–87). He contributed spacecraft designs to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and worked on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986).
Cocoon (1985). At the 58th Academy Awards in March 1986, the Oscar for Visual Effects went to Ken Ralston, Ralph McQuarrie, Scott Farrar and David Berry for Cocoon, as listed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and reported by the Christian Science Monitor.
What to look at in a Ralph McQuarrie painting
A cinematic frame. His production paintings are composed like film frames, usually in a wide landscape format. There is a clear horizon, a camera height you can locate and a main action placed where the eye lands first.
Muted, atmospheric colour. Writing in Entertainment Weekly after his death, the critic Christian Blauvelt described McQuarrie’s style as strongly geometric subjects in muted colours against a flat, compressed backdrop. Look for dusty ochres and greys in desert scenes, cold blues and whites in snow scenes, and skies graded softly from light to dark. Bright colour is saved for small accents such as weapon blasts, lights or a sunset.
Big simple shapes. Spacecraft, buildings and characters are reduced to bold silhouettes: wedges, domes, cylinders, a helmet outline. The detail is suggested rather than drawn rivet by rivet, so the shapes read from across a room.
A lived-in world. Blauvelt also credited him with a “used future” look: machines and settings that look worn, dusty and repaired rather than gleaming. Weathering makes invented technology feel as if it has a history.
Engineering logic. His Boeing training shows. Machines have plausible joints, hatches and proportions, and they sit in light consistently. McQuarrie told Star Wars Insider that when asked for a menacing caped villain, he reasoned that the character would need to survive in space and so proposed a breathing mask combined with a helmet inspired by samurai armour.
Technique: gouache, acrylic and board
The Lucas Museum’s catalogue lists McQuarrie’s 1975 paintings as gouache, or acrylic and gouache, on illustration board, with graphite pencil in some. Gouache is an opaque watercolour that dries quickly and flat, so it suits a working illustrator who needs to block in large areas of sky and ground, then add hard-edged highlights on top. The matte finish also photographs evenly, which mattered for paintings that were reproduced in presentations and books.
When you study reproductions, read them in layers: the big tonal masses of sky and ground, then the horizon and the direction of light, and only then the crisp highlights on hulls and armour. That order is a useful way to build any illustration, digital or physical.
How designers can borrow from Ralph McQuarrie today
Pitch with one hero image. When a concept is hard to describe, a single finished-looking image can do what pages of copy cannot. Lucas’s tribute after McQuarrie’s death made the point: when words failed, he could point at a painting and ask for it to be done like that. Spend time on one key frame before you spread effort across many rough ones.
Design the frame like a film still. For hero banners, posters and covers, fix a horizon and camera height, then place the main subject on a strong diagonal or third. The same staging rules are covered in our guide to poster design principles.
Mute the palette, then add one accent. Build a restrained palette of three or four dusty tones and one saturated accent for the focal point. Try combinations in the colour palette generator. Treat any colours you take from reproductions of his paintings as your own interpretation, not as measured values.
Make invented objects plausible. In product renders, game assets or illustrated mascots, give objects visible logic: how they open, where they join, why they are shaped that way. Add a little wear so they look used.
Work from silhouette. Test a character or icon as a solid black shape. If it is not recognisable in silhouette, simplify it before adding detail.
Ralph McQuarrie’s legacy for concept art
McQuarrie declined to design the later prequel films and retired; his paintings have since been shown in exhibitions such as Star Wars: The Magic of Myth in 1999. Unused designs of his have since been adapted for later animated series. For designers the lasting idea is simple: a concept painting is a persuasive document, and its job is to make people believe.
Frequently asked questions
What is Ralph McQuarrie known for?
He is known for the 1975 production paintings that helped George Lucas pitch the first Star Wars film, for character and vehicle designs in that series, and for sharing the Academy Award for Visual Effects for Cocoon (1985).
What did Ralph McQuarrie do before film work?
He was a technical illustrator. He worked as a preliminary design illustrator at Boeing, drew diagrams for 747 manuals, designed film posters and made animations explaining the Apollo missions for CBS News.
What medium did Ralph McQuarrie paint in?
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art lists his 1975 production paintings as gouache, or acrylic and gouache, on illustration board, sometimes with graphite pencil.
Can I use Ralph McQuarrie’s art in my own designs?
No. His paintings are in copyright, and the film names and characters are trademarks of their owners. Study his staging, palette and silhouettes, and use public-domain museum images for any visuals you reproduce.
